Maximizing business outcomes with your customer research at scale-ups

Stephen Carrey-Chan at UXDX Community: Maximizing Outcomes & Securing Beta Success. Video: https://youtu.be/WfHJEG2hXrc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Hello and three fun facts about me

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, hi UXDX community, so nice to meet you all. For those of you who may not know me, I am Stephen Carrey-Chan. I work at a commercial real estate investing platform called CrowdStreet, and I'm, as Rory had mentioned, the director of product management and design there. I head up those two functions at the company, and we're considered, I would call us, a scale-up company, where the company's been around for a certain amount of years, has struck product-market fit with a service, and right now is really focused on scaling exponentially so that we could eventually hit an exit goal, whatever that exit strategy looks like.

[00:00:42] Before I get started, I'm a huge fan of icebreakers. I like to create a connection, and so I figured I'd share three fun facts about myself. The first being I'm based in New York state. I used to be in the city, but looks can be deceiving. I know maybe you'll conclude this by the end of this presentation: I am deeply an introvert, but that is something that I've come to embrace and acknowledge, and I ran away to the mountains in Upstate New York to get away from people. But not forever.

[00:01:18] Another thing I like to do is not explain really what I do as a product manager or a product designer to non-tech people. It's something I like to have a little bit of mischievous fun with. I don't know if you've ever had to explain to a family member who might not be familiar with the tech startup space what it is that you do, and I don't know, I've grown to love not being easy to label, or not making it easy for people to label you. It's pretty liberating, and so I've just learned to have fun with it and make up what I do and just see how they react.

[00:01:53] Yeah, you're probably already getting a sense of who I am, and that's the goal. But if you want to hear more about me beyond this talk, another fun fact: recently I was part of usertesting.com's podcast series, Insights Unlocked. You can go to episode 97. They have a lot of great content there. For all of my fellow research and user testing and usability testing fans out there, I very much would love to hear your thoughts if you have a listen to that podcast episode.

A little bit about CrowdStreet

[00:02:30] So that's a little bit about me, and a little bit about CrowdStreet. I started to talk about CrowdStreet as a scale-up company, but for those who are interested to learn more about the company I work at, I've been at CrowdStreet for three years coming January, so I'm looking forward to hitting that milestone. Fun things about CrowdStreet: the company has been ranked as the number one best overall commercial real estate crowdfunding platform for the last at least two years. I think it actually also was consistent with 2020 and 2021, by Investopedia. You can see why they continuously rank CrowdStreet at the top. It's great to be working with such a talented, very intelligent group of team members and experts in this industry. It's very fascinating and I've fallen in love with it.

[00:03:19] The company's been around for 10 years and we have a very specific customer base, so it does involve a lot of deep research, and that's also one of my favorite parts about being a product manager and product designer running with these two teams. This customer base, these are very complex consumers. I wouldn't even call them consumers. These investors are very financially savvy, very niche, and the fact that the company's been able to bring on over 20,000 accredited investors into our space and fundraise millions and millions of dollars of real estate projects every week, it is a very fascinating space.

Why I'm here: research and business outcomes

[00:04:07] So that is a little bit about me and about the company I work at, but that is not why we're all here. I'm here to talk about how to, as researchers, as designers, as product people or engineers or business people, if you're here, hello, thank you for joining. I'm here to talk about how we can use research effectively to maximize the business outcomes. While we are spending the bulk of our time with users, with customers, with clients, whatever term we use to define who our target audience is that we're trying to understand, we always need to make sure that there's a reason for why our roles exist. For organizations, for businesses, it's to help drive impact, to help drive revenue, and to help drive efficiency, whatever it is that we're trying to research and uncover.

[00:04:59] And so that's really something I'm here to talk to all of us about. There are a lot of challenges I've observed from direct experience, from communities I'm a part of and peers, when it comes to research and how it might not necessarily be used to its fullest potential. So I'll chat a little bit about that before going into this concept of the usability of our research and our insights. Usability is a term we all should be familiar with, but if not, I'll speak briefly to that.

[00:05:29] And then some tactics. Specifically I'm going to just give three. It's not all-encompassing, but three very tangible and actionable tactics and themes that can help you, whether you are a product manager, designer or researcher who's doing research, talking to customers, qualitative research, market research, quantitative, how you can maximize the business outcomes of that research that you're prioritizing and spending your time doing. And then looking ahead, what to expect and how we can keep in touch, and all that jazz.

The challenge: research that collects dust

[00:06:05] So the challenge first when it comes to research. There are many different challenges, but I think one of the first questions I have for you all, and I hope you all can take a moment with me, whether you want to say this out loud to yourself or you want to drop it into the chat so Rory can get spammed by a ton of numbers and dates, have fun with it. My question is: how long on average would you say does it take for you to complete a research initiative? I know we could have multi-month, multi-quarter long research initiatives. It could be very contained in small projects, but on average, you know, it's fine if it's in weeks, if it's in months.

[00:06:46] In general, it can take a lot of time. Even if we're talking about a few days, which is great, if you've been able to pull off research initiatives end to end within a few days, I want to know your secret. Please find me on LinkedIn and tell me that you've uncovered the Holy Grail. But if not, even just saying a few weeks to a few months, hopefully not quarters, but those do exist too, that's a lot of time doing research. Not just involving yourself and maybe direct research partners, but also a ton of customers. What is all of that amounting to, and more importantly, what has become of that research?

[00:07:27] In general, nine times out of ten, is your research being leveraged and you're seeing the returns right away? It's being put into actionable designs and development for projects, or service design, or process? Or is it being ignored? Is it being put on the shelf? Unfortunately this isn't a live, dynamic or in-person event where I could see hands raised or whatnot, but for the most part, when I talk to people about this, most of the time, more than 50%, generally the answer I get is: yeah, most of the time my research does get ignored, or it collects dust, because the priorities are not ready yet, or we don't have enough resources to work on this type of research just yet.

[00:08:15] And that's tragic to me. I encourage us all to think about, yes, that's very frustrating, we all should care about the fact that this is a problem when it comes to research, and it's what inspired me to want to put a talk like this together, or just pitch, hey, I have some ideas and I have some learnings and I'm applying it within my own teams. But I do want to ask you all, this is all what I'm about to share coming from my own direct research and experiences and applying that and seeing what's working and what's not.

[00:08:52] I just continue to encourage us all to be curious and ask ourselves, we can come to our own conclusions, but really, just like with our customers, when we talk to customers, why is that really a problem? All of the whys. Ask those five whys for ourselves. Why is the research not being applied? Maybe because, like I mentioned, resources are just needed somewhere else. Why did I do that research, blah blah blah. You can start to get the gist.

What I mean by a scale-up

[00:09:20] So I wanted to set that tone, have us do a lot of introspection first, and now that we've done that, I also want to get one thing level set with this group here before I start to talk more about why specifically for this talk, scale-ups. That's something that in this presentation is specifically called out. We're not talking about early stage or pre-seed companies, or enterprise level. I think research has a very different experience for those types of companies, and by different people too, and players.

[00:09:55] And so when I say a scale-up, you can find so many great free resources on the different types of stages, but a scale-up in my mind, if this visual seemed to capture it the most simplistically and straightforward to me, I would describe it as the stage where a company has, and I'm keeping it very simple, layman's terms, so please don't judge me, academics out there, or bear with me and give me some grace, but a scale-up: you found that product-market fit with a service, with a digital experience, an app, whatever it is that you're bringing to market. You found an audience, you're seeing it have momentum, it's picking up, and perhaps you've gone through a few series or rounds of funding, and so now the company is really set on exponential growth goals and trying to expand its market share in that space with its total addressable market.

[00:10:55] And so what comes with this phase, this scale-up phase of a company, it's typically the quickest and the most significant stage of a company, because it determines who's going to become the next Netflix, the next Uber, hopefully not the next WeWork and something more along the lines of the first two brands, and the list can go on and on. But what comes with that fast speed and the high stakes and standards and expectations are some of the most pressuring, or high stress challenges, or complex challenges too. And that comes with processes needing to be stood up, or being changed and revisited or taken down. That comes with trying to expand your customer base from a very niche audience of early adopters to more of the majority. How do you start to leap over that chasm, cross that chasm?

[00:11:54] And so there's a lot around scale-ups that, if you're interested, you can see in my LinkedIn background, I kind of just keep coming back to scale-ups because I do like the challenges. And something that I didn't mention at the beginning but I should have is, I do like to terrify myself a little bit. That was something about being an introvert, is giving these type of talks. And so this little quote here, I just need to acknowledge that yeah, scale-ups do kind of, in a healthy way, intimidate me, challenge me, scare me sometimes when I wake up. But that's something I found to be incredibly fulfilling, because that's where I'm seeing the most growth in myself, and I see it in a lot of companies and teams that I get to work with every single day.

Why unified direction matters at this stage

[00:12:43] So that's scale-ups for us folks, and at this critical stage, and bringing it back to the research, user research, and making sure we're tied to business outcomes. With this critical stage we need to make sure that the contributions, the leaders of these scale-up companies need to be very focused on making sure that everyone's contributions across different teams, different functions, are all unified in a strategic direction. That needs to be the top priority.

[00:13:12] If we cannot do that, if companies and senior leadership have trouble defining that unified collective direction, that can start to risk not only wasted work, but opportunity costs, because the trade-offs that we had to make to not pursue accelerating problem X, or solution X, or trying to explore a new product, that was all an opportunity cost. That's always been the case, but especially in today's market. I'll be very frank with us all and call out the elephant, maybe it's not an elephant in the room, I'll be honest, it's the job market today, and a lot of companies under a lot of financial pressure and stress.

[00:13:59] If functions are not able to be coordinated and work in a unified direction, and that really boils all the way up to senior leadership being able to define that, then there are even costlier budgeting consequences that we're seeing, unfortunately. And so it's really tough to see. But there are ways, when we are in research positions or even just any role in product development, that we need to make sure we're aligning ourselves with what the business needs, which also happens to be what our customers need. We just need to focus on which problems specifically we'll tackle, and when, and what's for later.

Treating research like a product

[00:14:40] So this will, I think, start to set the tone for the tactics that I'll start to go into. I like to look at research similar to how I look at developing a product. When I say developing a product, yes, obviously the research is a part of it, but I'm talking about the actual product development, the coding, the implementation of whatever the scope is that's been defined, and the designs. Making sure that we are not just open-endedly building out a feature to the point where we get to diminishing returns. We don't have that luxury. No company does, no product team does. And customers may ask for the sky and every single edge case. We don't have that luxury to do that, not even enterprise companies.

[00:15:30] So we need to make sure we're focused, not only in our product development, but I'm going to start to talk about research like a product for you all. That is something, when I say why do we not do the same with research, I don't think that's necessarily pointed at researchers. It could be, if you're a product person, or a designer, or a business leader. And I'm guilty of this myself. Earlier on in my career I saw research as just something you do, you check off the box, it's performative, maybe it's a validating thing just to make sure that I want to validate my own biases or my hypotheses.

[00:16:17] And so I guess what I'm trying to say is it came with this sense of freeness, because I wasn't putting the same weight of research costs and expenses as I was with engineering costs and expenses, or designer costs and expenses. So this is something I want to, if you don't already do that, I want to introduce this concept of looking at research like a product that you're developing, that has a set amount of time. We don't have forever to do this research, and ideally at the end of the day we want to make sure that this research does get put to use and it gets acted upon, and so that we can see the outcomes come to fruition.

Research is your product, the product team is your customer

[00:17:01] So I'll just read this word for word, because I don't think I can add to it any better. If you think about improving the usability of our research, then we can increase the likelihood that it will be put into action sooner, as opposed to never being used. And what I mean by that is research usability: it needs to be like a product, and it has customers. Who are those customers? We need to think about, let me move forward here, we need to look at our product consumer, our product partners, or whoever is consuming our research. This could be business leaders as well, this could be engineers, but in this case right now I'm going to focus on the dynamic of product managers with researchers.

[00:17:47] We need to make sure that we understand our target customer of our product. So I'll say it again, and forgive that earlier slide, I should have cleared that up, but think of our research as the product that we need to focus on improving the usability of. And in order to understand what makes this product usable, we need to understand who the end consumer is. And those customers, those end consumers, are the product team, the ones who would actually be able to breathe life into the insights, into the findings that we're extrapolating from all of our qualitative and quantitative research. I'll do it one more time: research is your product, your customers are the product team.

Tactic one: develop a business-focused mindset

[00:18:46] Cool, okay. So hopefully that, and I'm doing a time check to see how I'm doing on time, so I'll go through these tactics now that I've sort of set that mindset. And all of this that I'm going to walk you through, I encourage you to start small, because this will take some muscle building, and also there's some branding of your own, your own perception and your reputation, your credibility, that you'll start to cultivate, not just the muscles. And so start with those near-term impactful wins. I'll speak more to that at the end.

[00:19:27] Tactic number one, to help with maximizing the business outcomes of your research, is to first develop a business-focused mindset. And what I mean by that is making sure that you're really deeply understanding your business, just like your customers. We're all great with customers, but how familiar are we with the business and how it operates, how it makes money? Are we very clear with what the priorities are, what the senior leaders are ultimately trying to do at the end of the day, what the financial targets are? And also thinking about OKRs, KPIs.

[00:20:06] The outcome I'm trying to get to with this first tactic is to make sure that we're increasing our proximity with the business. And what I mean by that is your domain knowledge of what could be influencing your target customer, in this case the product managers. So an example: as researchers we might be focusing on questions like, well, our users are wanting X, Y and Z, X percentage of them are incredibly frustrated with this workflow, or their complaints are popping up in these forums. You're the sound, or the voice, as researchers we're the voice of our customers. But those customers aren't representing the business. That's where our product managers are trying to reconcile what customers need as well as with what the business needs.

[00:21:01] And so some of their questions, or some of the problems that are on their minds, could very much be: yeah, some of our high value customers are pissed about X, Y and Z, and if we lose those high value, top 5% net worth customers, our business takes an 80% hit in revenue. Or, we're behind on growth targets because we're trying to keep up with these financial milestones as a scale-up. Or, there's a new regulation that's going into effect that's going to affect our whole industry, operations teams are bottlenecked, and all this stuff. Our customers are not representing or advocating for that, nor should they, but all of this our product managers are also balancing and reconciling with customer research. This all plays a role in terms of what our customers get at the end of the day from our services.

[00:21:55] So making sure that we're also aware of, not any, all of the competing priorities that could be knocking on product's and business's door. I encourage all of us to go beyond just speaking to users, customers, and doing the market research, and making sure we understand our whole ecosystem. And so what could some of these competing priorities be that could potentially impact a team's ability, a product team's ability, to work on any actionable insights that came out of my research? So essentially understanding all of the chess pieces that are at play. That is another concept.

[00:22:34] And then lastly, I mentioned this at the beginning of this tactic here, but OKRs as well, objectives and key results, and key performance indicators, in this case across teams. So typically you might have some success KPIs, but if you're the growth team you're focusing on conversion rates and minimizing drop-off within a funnel. Those are all metrics that are public, they're available, hopefully they're public, but they are out there, they're being used by certain folks across the company to make decisions.

[00:23:07] As researchers, as designers, I encourage us, I really recommend, if you don't have access to this, if you don't know what your company or your future company is using to make decisions, ask for this information. I have never personally, and I'd want to know if you do come across this, I've never come across a company that's denied someone insight into these metrics, because these can be indicators of when priorities need to change.

[00:23:34] And all of this is a great level of awareness to help us understand as researchers, ooh, is what I'm doing right now really the right thing? If I see a certain problem area starting to grow and my research is on a different topic, that gives me the tea leaves that I need to read, that I might need to either pivot proactively, I could do that, or someone else might ask me to, or I can deliver the research and then it doesn't get worked on.

Tactic two: present yourself as a desirable, strategic partner

[00:24:10] And this is all leading up to the second tactic here, which is: now that we're starting to increase our business proximity, understand all the different competing priorities and incentives of a business, how can we now as researchers present ourselves as a desirable and strategic partner with our product partners out there, our product counterparts, meaning the product manager?

[00:24:40] And so it starts with understanding who our product manager is as a customer. So what are all of the different incentives out there that they could be focused on? Product management is a really freaking hard job. It's for a very particular type of individual, for sure. And while they are ultimately accountable for making a lot of really high visibility decisions, we need to understand our decision makers, what guides and motivates their decision making. All of it is generally coming from a really good place, hopefully, if they're a really good PM, and it could be a balance of many different things. This is an unexhausted list.

[00:25:25] Focusing on impact with customers and working towards a mission is a big one, but also reliability and perception is something that they have to manage very frequently. They need to make sure that the teams are delivering against the commitments on time, and making sure communication is very strong. They have to manage perceptions constantly, because they're leading without actual direct authority, management authority. And also leaders and finance team members are looking to our product people to make sure that we're moving KPIs in the right directions. And if you work at a company that's not necessarily as product led, then there's some change management and change agency involved by these PMs. They need to help inspire and show the power of product management. It's not necessarily something that everyone understands, especially if they come from industries that are not as tech driven.

[00:26:30] And when it comes to understanding, once you know the incentives of these product people, start to build a relationship with them and understand how can you work with each other, what does it look like to be your best selves. So I call this the trust building, overcoming team dysfunctions. If you know Patrick Lencioni's book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it's a fantastic book. But also having keystone conversations as well, and I think that's a more concise way to get to the heart of the matter, which is: you two are peers at the end of the day, your product manager and you're the researcher.

[00:27:08] Having a keystone conversation about, what does your best look like, how can we work together, what is our ideal working relationship in both of our minds? All of this is around benchmarking to see where we both are, see where there's a gap, and agree that you two can work together at filling that gap. You can set those expectations. And so a great example of benchmarking is seeing how your product manager views research today in the product development life cycle. How do they lean on it, how much weight do they put on qualitative or quantitative research? And all of this is to make sure that we're striving to build the best possible relationship with our product partners. So knowing what their incentives are, but then knowing how the two can work, and really building that trust. It's going to take time.

[00:28:07] And then the last part, I think this is the last part of this tactic that I like to drive home, is now show that you can think like them. So connect those dots between your insights and the target outcomes. Your product manager, if they're fantastic, they might already do that for you and explain, hey, this is a research opportunity I think we could do because of X, Y and Z. That's great, then the work's been done, and it shows that they value your research work. If they haven't done it, then you're being asked to do this research work for some reason, but it's not necessarily clear. Take a swing at trying to do that work, and bring your product manager into that case building of connecting the dots between, oh, if we find out these insights from these user interviews, or from this market research or competitive research, this is what it can inform that can help us achieve XYZ target outcomes.

[00:29:04] And all throughout this, the first tactic, talking about monitoring the business health, potential indicators of priorities changing, to seeing how your research is coming along, maybe things are taking a bit longer, as you have these one-on-one relationships or one-on-one check-ins with your product manager, and if you don't have them I encourage you to definitely set those up, use that time to also validate any predictions. If you're reading tea leaves and you're getting a sense that, actually, I think this is still on target, great, are we still clear, are we good, PM? Having those check-ins, those pulse checks, or saying, hey, I want you to be honest with me, are you seeing us needing to shift priorities soon, because I'm seeing this certain OKR target off track, or we're behind target, things like that. Just so you can again become problem solvers together, and continue to initiate and pull your PM into the problem solving, collaborative problem solving, that will really help you build up a brand of being a strategist, not just a researcher.

Tactic three: scope research responsibly and stay accountable

[00:30:15] Cool. So I want to do one quick check on time. Are we good for me to go like five more minutes, Rory?

[00:30:28] Rory: We're a little bit over time already. If you can wrap up in the next minute or so it would be great.

[00:30:35] Stephen: I will wrap up in the next minute or so, thank you. And I appreciate everyone's patience here. So the final piece here, and I'll give the TL;DR version, is really making sure that as you embark on any research in the beginning, make sure we're scoping this research responsibly and staying accountable to that scope. Think of research like money. When I mentioned the product development similarly in the beginning, I really mean that research and your time is money, just like coding with an engineer. And so asking ourselves, do we even need this research? It's going to take time, it's not free.

[00:31:16] And a great way to make sure that we're very clear and intentional about what our research is being put to use for and how it's going to be leveraged is putting together a research brief. I like to use this as a scope agreement with the product manager, and also making sure that we have a definition of done in mind. So once we have that definition of done, this is where we can be accountable with timelines. So making sure that we are focusing on momentum, avoiding analysis paralysis, and also making sure that we're providing updates and check-ins, keeping it fresh, top of mind, with our product partners and our overall sprint teams.

[00:32:01] And then lastly, when I say accountable, you're accountable on making sure that your research is truly internalized. That's the outcome that we want from our decision makers and consumers of this information, in this case the product manager, business leaders, development teams. So working with your product partner and stakeholders on knowing what's their, I say, love language with how they want to consume your insights and information that matters, just like a product marketing strategy plan. So making sure that those audiences walk away with your findings, they've internalized it, and you've started to get the sparks flowing. That is the final final piece.

[00:32:43] So thank you very much for hearing me out. These are the tactics that I'll leave you with. It's not all-encompassing, but really it's a business-focused mindset, with ways to present yourself as a desirable strategic partner, so there's a branding aspect to this, and then putting it into work through your scope of research and timelines, and just making sure that you're always not treating your research and your time as free. So with that, thank you.

[00:33:20] Rory: Thank you very much, Stephen, that was great. I always loved the concept of treating what you're doing as a product in and of itself: like, who's my customer, what's the value they're trying to achieve? So I think that's a brilliant way of looking at it, so thanks for sharing that.

[00:33:36] Stephen: Yeah, no, thank you, thank you.

[00:33:39] Rory: And if anybody has any questions, we've run out of time right now, but if you put the question in the chat, what we'll do is we'll copy that into our Slack group and we'll invite Stephen to come along and answer the question in there. So please do post any questions you have and we'll get those answered for you.

[00:33:54] Stephen: Awesome, thanks so much.